What My Dad Gave Me at Rockefeller Center

Chris Burden at Rockefeller Center

Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, at the end of Rockefeller Center's

Channel Gardens.

Flanked by Kenneth Cole to its left and Cole Haan to its right, on its own grey pedestal and lit with a truss of theatre lights from the tops of three neighboring rooftops, this 65 foot skyscraper is welcome company for the real scale structures of Rockefeller Center. It barely obscures (but definitely mirrors) the building directly across it on the Plaza – 30 Rockefeller, over whose entrance a stone relief reads "Wisdom and Knowledge Shall be the Stability of Thy Times."

If the Erector set was first invented in 1912 as a monument to the steel framework of construction sites in New York City, this sculpture by Chris Burden is a monument to the private ambitions of the child that played with that toy. Made out of about a million electro-plated, nickel-finished, stainless steel replicas of Erector set pieces, What My Dad Gave Me conflates the architecture of capitalism with the products it purveys. At the same time, the sculpture distills the formal elements of its immediate real-world referents, taking the concept of the skyscraper and imagining it transparent, gridded, uninhabitable, abstract.

- Farrah Karapetian

Image: Chris Burden, What My Dad Gave Me (2008). Courtesy Public Art Fund/Gagosian Gallery/Tishman Speyer. Photo: Stuart Ramson.